The Wheels Just Came Off the Trump Campaign

Donald Trump's campaign manager denied allegations Tuesday that Melania Trump plagiarized a Michelle Obama speech on the first night of the Republican National Convention, calling the accusation "just really absurd."

"To think that she would do something like that knowing how scrutinized her speech was going to be last night is just really absurd," Trump's campaign chairman Paul Manafort told CNN's Chris Cuomo on "New Day."

At least one passage in Trump's speech Monday night plagiarized from Obama's address to the Democratic National Convention in 2008.

Side-by-side comparisons of the transcripts show the text in Trump's address following, nearly to the word, the would-be future first lady's own from the first night of the Democratic convention in Denver nearly eight years ago.

"I just don't see it," Christie told CNN's Jamie Gangel in an interview Tuesday, adding later, "If we're talking about 7% of a speech, that was really, universally considered to be a good performance by Melania. I know her. There's no way that Melania Trump was plagiarizing Michelle Obama's speech."

You can practically draw a line from what happened back to the Trump campaign. Some flunky was assigned the task of producing a speech that would put Trump's Eastern European trophy wife (not that one, his new one) in a more positive light. They began with a Google search and found the speeches by Anne Romney and John McCain's already forgotten trophy wife to be insufficient. They then went with the speech given by Michelle Obama because that's the one that had the most substance and the most ideas. That's the one they were told to use because it was significantly better than everything else out there.

See, the Democrats have the high-end talent. This has been true for the better part of a decade. The real show is on the Democratic side--this is where the talented people and the celebrities want to be. The horror show of incompetents is on the Republican side. That's what you get when all you can attract are sweaty white men in fat pants.

As they worked through that version, the speechwriter forgot to completely eliminate the phrasing in the text he had copied and pasted from the original source. Everyone uses a basic framework to draft a speech of a certain length and on a certain topic. But when you develop that speech, you have to go through every bit of it and re-word everything so that you don't get caught plagiarizing the original. Whether it was laziness, incompetence, or a compressed timeline--who cares? They got caught trying to repackage Democratic ideas as Republican ideas and now they're in panic mode.

This is the gang that couldn't shoot straight. They're now caught by a media complex that is starting to figure out that they need to point these things out. If there's one positive thing to come out of this, it's the coverage. Almost universally, they're telling the American people that the Trump campaign can't come up with an original speech for Melania Trump. This is how they'll govern--like panicky, piss-panted fools.

Day two of the GOP National Convention opens with the Trump campaign desperately trying to push back against the media narrative that has already taken hold--these people have no ideas, the D-list celebrities were an embarrassment, and the wheels are completely off the thing. It's hurtling over a cliff and the smart Republicans who stayed home are feeling pretty good right now. John Kasich's stock goes up every minute he stays away from this shit show.